Moms and pop stores in Hawaii

Latrice Komoda, 80, serves doughnuts on a stick at the Komoda Store & Bakery in Makawao on Maui. The store is more famous for its cream puffs than other baked goods. CAROL PUCCI, THE SEATTLE TIMES

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Roadside stands and mom and pop shops, like this brightly colored Julia's Best Banana Bread in Kahakuloa on Maui, sometimes have funky hours. The stand shuts when it sells out. Mom & pop stores, stands and restaurants are worth a journey for a taste of old Hawaii. CINDY YAMANAKA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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Paniolo Courtyard is in Makawao, Maui. Clothing shops, Western memorabilia and galleries can be found at the Upcountry Maui outdoor mall. CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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The Kanemitsu Bakery on Molokai sells bread and pastries to go, but also has a popular coffee shop for those who want to hang out. KEVIN SULLIVAN, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

This Wailuku Japanese fast food place is known for its fresh sushi and friendly service according to Maui Yelpers. It is a good example of small local business that is hanging on, catering to residents and tourists. CINDY YAMANAKA, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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The Kanemitsu Bakery on Molokai is a local favorite. KEVIN SULLIVAN, THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

The best cream puffs in Hawaii, and perhaps in the world, can only be purchased in a plain-fronted building along Baldwin Avenue in the dusty old paniolo (cowboy) town of Makawao on the island of Maui. You'll need to get there early if you want to try one.

Komoda's Store & Bakery sells more than 700 cream puffs on weekdays, and about 1,800 on a slow Saturday. Nearly all of the sales occur before 9 a.m. There's nary a cream puff in sight after that. The recipe is a Coca-Cola-type secret developed under the late Takeo Komoda, who was born in a house across the street in 1916. The business that Takeo's family established just after he was born is now in the hands of his daughter and son-in-law, Calvin Shibuya, who retired as an Air Force pilot 15 years ago.

It's a Saturday morning, and Shibuya looks like he has been up all night – which he has, getting ready for the weekend crush. Customers began lining up at the door at 6:30 for the 7 a.m. opening. Two hours later, some 1,800 cream puffs have been sold, including one to me. I purchased it from Aiko Shibuya, a great-granddaughter of the founding family, who comes over from Oahu with her boyfriend, a Honolulu cop, to help out on Saturdays.

One reason for Komoda's popularity is the Hawaiian tradition of omiyage: when you visit another island, you take something special from your own island. Komoda's cream puffs are a popular item in this regard. But there are many others around the island sold from mom and pop stores and stands, some dating from long before McDonalds or Subway planted its corporate flag in Hawaii.

Many are family operations far from the beaten tourist path, like Ichiban Okazuya in Wailuku on Maui. Or they close up shop when things get too slow or too fast, as is the case of Julia's Best Banana Bread, in Kahakuloa on Maui. Bad weather, it closes. Sell out early, it closes. It's a long drive to come late and leave with an empty stomach.

One of a kind

By far the most common mom-and-pop enterprise was the small grocery, which was a precursor of the modern convenience store. Many Hawaiians still eschew the big box discounters and pay a little more to patronize people who will treat them as though they will meet again.

Hasegawa General Store has been a fixture in the town of Hana on Maui since 1910. Right at the door is an 8-foot-wide community bulletin board that is a montage of rooms for rent, cars for sale, handymen for hire and pets and advice for free. Inside, men with graying hair and cafe-au-lait skin are consuming huge amounts of coffee. Everything is for sale here, from popsicles to spare generator parts.

Neil Hasegawa, the proprietor, says the store was established by a great-grandfather and his brother, both of whom came to Hawaii from Japan at the turn of the last century as contract sugar workers. "We probably won't be selling out to Wal-Mart any time soon," he says. "But remember, Wal-Mart started out as a family business, too, just like us." A smile tweaks his mustache.

A world of tastes

When the waves of immigration to Hawaii's sugar cane fields began in the late 19th century, the term "local culture" was redefined to encompass not just native Hawaiians, but also the Chinese, Japanese and Portuguese contract laborers who became the islands' newest residents. Immigrants from Europe, Korea, Puerto Rico and the Philippines arrived soon after. Many harbored an entrepreneurial spirit, and when their contracts were up, they started their own businesses.

These multi-generational "mom-and-pops," like Komoda's bakery, have defined Hawaii's character. Today many of these unusual and tiny stalls of free enterprise live on and continue to serve the community – and they are great places for visitors to patronize for an authentic Hawaiian experience.

Most of these all-in-the-family businesses are food-related, and they offer not only an avenue to "mingle with the locals" but a great way to save money on meals. For example, on Maui's sister island of Lanai, the locals' favorite restaurant is the Blue Ginger Café in Lanai City, which is not a city at all but a cluster of little plantation homes with a shaded town square surrounded by towering Norfolk pines.

At lunch time at the Blue Ginger, you'll find a Dickensian gallery of characters. Bobby. Fernando. Bernardo. Chogoro. There's enough seniority here to chair a congressional committee. Everyone, including the dogs, is greeted by name. The voices rub cheerfully against each other. Acrid cigarette smoke and wisps of conversations float over from other tables, swelled by a rising tide of repartee and playful insult ("Hey, Andy, come back again when you don't have so much time").

Nearly everyone is dining on a true Hawaiian specialty – the plate lunch. These meals are the preferred lunch staple for businessmen, laborers and students. For about $5 and a five-minute wait, you can get an entree (beef teriyaki, roast pork, shoyu chicken, hamburger steak, beef curry, mahi-mahi and meat loaf are the most popular), two scoops of white rice smothered in rich savory gravy, and macaroni salad. Plate lunches have been popular in Hawaii since the late '20s and early '30s, when plantation workers would bring their wife-made food in tin boxes and pails with sections for the different dishes.

Japan in a bowl

Another Hawaiian specialty is saimin, a steaming meal-in-a-bowl of savory beef broth, noodles, various vegetables, fish cake, pork, beef and slivers of Spam. One of the great saimin venues is Hamura Saimin in Lihue on Kauai. Some call it the Saimin Hall of Fame, for it serves up more than 1,000 bowls every day. The parking area is engulfed by pickups. It doesn't look like much on the outside – or the inside, for that matter. Just a cafe with stools at a counter and a few scattered tables. The place is packed, and there's a roaring fire of conversation. People leap into each other's pauses. Skyrockets of laughter shoot to the ceiling. The cutlery and saucers clang while Randy Travis twangs from the jukebox, which is turned up so loud you can almost burn calories listening to it.

Hamura's was opened here on Kress Street in 1951 by Aiko Hamura, who perfected her recipe from a base of noodles, flour, eggs, water and salt. It, too, is a closely guarded secret. Since 1990 the establishment has been owned and operated by the Hiraoka family, but Hamura saimin remains the specialty of the house and is something of a legend throughout Hawaii. A small saimin is $3.75, the medium is $4 and the large is $4.25. There's an extra large for $4.50, and for $6 there's an extra-extra large that looks like it could feed a family of four for a week. Watch the locals to learn saimin etiquette: Use chopsticks as a kind of pitchfork, guiding the noodles to your mouth with the help of your spoon. Slurping isn't forbidden. It's required.

Roasting on a volcano

At Grandma's Coffee House, in the Upcountry town of Keokea on Maui, Al Franco is hand-cranking the beans in a 100-year-old, wood-fired roaster. Grandma was Al's grandmother, Minnie Franco, whose parents came to Maui from Puerto Rico in 1899. She began working in the sugar cane fields as a young girl. In her idle hours, she would pick wild coffee beans from the slopes of the Haleakala volcano and roast them over an open fire in her back yard. She perfected her technique and acquired a hand-cranked roasting machine made in Philadelphia by Burpee in 1885. It is that same 120-year-old machine that her grandson is now cranking.

"I could put a motor on it, but it's better by hand," says Franco, who still remembers walking home from school, catching the mahogany odor of his grandmother's brew, and running the rest of the way for a cup. Grandma passed on her secrets of growing, harvesting and roasting to her grandson, and in 1985 Franco opened the coffee house.

Mornings are busiest at Grandma's. Conversations leapfrog from table to table, and locals pitchfork 1,500-calorie omelets.

Going nuts for Molokai

If it's macadamia nuts you're looking for, the place to go is Purdy's All-Natural Macadamia Nut Farm, which operates a retail stand off a dirt road in Hoolehua on Molokai. The air is varnished with the odor of roasting macadamias, and Harry Kanekawaiola Purdy, known to all as Tuddie, is regaling a group of six tourists. "We have the nuts, roasted and raw. We have mac nut honey, mac nut honey mustard, mac nut jewelry, mac nut oil. ..." The words fly from his mouth at 100 miles per hour, with occasional gusts up to 150.

Tuddie says the Purdy family has operated the nut farm since 1929, using macadamia trees that were brought to Molokai from Australia. "The original 50 trees are more than 80 years old," he says. "They're not spring chickens, but they're still very productive, and we have no idea how long they will last." He's wearing dark gray shorts and a dark gray shirt. "I've got to go to a funeral this afternoon," he explains. "But help yourself to some nuts."

Downtown Kaunakakai on Molokai consists of three blocks of false-front stores along a street called the Ala Malama. Except for the palm trees, it could be a town out of frontier Arizona. A yeasty, heavenly odor wafts out of the Kanemitsu's Bakery, which has been making its famous Molokai bread for 85 years in a cast-iron, kiawe (mesquite)-fired oven. Kanemitsu's sells about 4,000 loaves a week. There are exotic flavors – from apricot-pineapple to mango (in season) – but the classics remain the regular white, wheat, cheese, sweet and onion-cheese breads.

In the adjoining coffee shop, men in shorts, sandals, T-shirts and baseball caps sip and wag old tales, speaking a kind of pidgin – as in "whatsamatta" and "cuppacoffee." Their words tumble over each other, as coal down a chute. Blossom PoePoe, the manager of the operation, says the store was opened in 1926 by Shigeo Kanemitsu, who died in 2004 at the age of 90. His son, George, is now the owner. Then, with a conspiratorial wink, she gives an insider tip: The locals line up at the back door every night at 10:30, when the first of the next day's bread emerges from the oven. You can order your fresh bread with butter, jelly, cinnamon or cream cheese, and the bakers will cut the hot loaves down the middle and slather on the works so it melts inside.

Good eats all around

There are dozens of these mom-and-pops scattered throughout the islands. On the Big Island, you can rub and bend elbows with the locals at Teshima Family Restaurant, which is known for its Japanese cuisine, though it began life by frying hamburgers when the area was filled with American servicemen during World War II.

Even Honolulu had mom-and-pops. Nisshodo Candy Store, for example, has been going for more than nine decades, serving up confections like monaka (rice cracker with azuki bean jam), kuri manju (baked bun stuffed with lima bean paste) and chichi dango (pink rice flour)

These businesses are essential to the Hawaiian identity. By patronizing them you will not only reward yourself by making your travel experience far richer, you'll be helping to ensure that they pass on to the next generation.

This is no small consideration, because more and more of them are being driven out of business by national retail chains. Lacking their original purpose, mom-and-pops are now threatened by a modern, mobile society that can conveniently travel to big-box stores with huge selections and lower prices.

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